Article 4 in the list: The New Life’: Mozambican Art Students in the USSR, and the Aesthetic Epistemologies of Anti-colonial Solidarity, Polly Savage.
This is an article on the role of art and artists in a post-revolutionary society, and the creative responses by art students to imposed epistemologies in a decolonialising context. It discusses the recollections and reflections on Mozambiquean art students sent to socialist countries for training in visual arts – specifically USSR’s Moscow and then Tashkent (1981-1985). The text predominantly discusses the journey and work of students Cejuma and Tisonto.
Two aspects Cejuma and peers’ history and artistic practice resonate with me particularly strongly:
- The critical exploration of opportunities, parameters and expectations -of socialist art education-, despite the urging socio-cultural and socio-economic motives that drew students to accept the scholarships abroad;
- the reluctancy to blindly accept the imposed ideologies and paradigms, while keeping the openness to “knowingly navigate the structures of a Russo-centric cultural hierarchy” (p.1087) – in Cejuma’s case, even mastering them to the level of achieving the mark of “excellent”.
These resulted in the emergence of new paradigms: the refiguration of socialism through the artists’ -later scholars’- critical engagement to competing epistemological impositions to define decolonial aesthetics. By exploring and developing their own aesthetic practice, students drew a legacy from the transnational art training and Frelimo’s (Mozambiquean revolutionary party) hopes for the new life promised by revolution.
Reflecting on the article
From a more ontological perspective, I reflect on the resulting “desire for a different form of socialism, a more intimate expression of solidarity” described by Savage (p.1098). I conjecture about the extend this was influenced by the extracurricular experience of students at Tashkent, which offered an environment of welcoming hospitality, friendship and cosmopolitan exchange. This offered opportunities for broad global networks and transnational solidarities, while conforming an artistic and scholarly community itself which somehow reflect on the idea and reformulation of socialism present in the aesthetics developed by these artists upon their return in Mozambique. Assessing this put value on the comprehensive education and training experience beyond curricular pedagogies, and more specifically the importance of the social and cultural context to facilitate for students to “navigate the pedagogic landscape on their own terms”. In other words, the friendly hospitality and community social system around these scholars might have positively influenced the way they received and experienced a pedagogic process based on the imposition of “cultural arbitrary by arbitrary power” (p.1087); being able to eventually adopt the aesthetic and technical standards of the institution, without renouncing to a future-oriented aesthetic that fell outside the bounds of the curriculum and escaped tradition with the vision of a new culture.